Hungry Moon (25 page)

^{Andrew had to make sure they went to Mr Mann. Then he wouldn't be even a little bit afraid of his father, wouldn't imagine he could feel his father's hand growing long and cold and stronger every time they stepped into the dark.}

^FORTY

^{When Diana concluded that the Wildes weren't taking up her offer of accommodation, she felt so resigned it was almost like relief. She was on her own, as apparently she needed to be. There was no use telling herself she wasn't all that Celtic: the depths of her mind knew better. There was no point in wishing someone was with her to make sure she didn't endanger herself. She could only trust her instincts, and hope it wasn't too late.}

^{She went round the cottage and made sure all the windows and outer doors were locked. She peered at all the light bulbs to see if any looked close to failing, then she climbed the stairs to her bedroom. Already she felt as if she'd been asleep for days and needed to relax in order to wake up, to see what was there to be seen. She lay on her bed and went through her relaxation exercises, tried to empty her mind and let the awareness in.}

^{It didn't work. Random thoughts kept drifting through. The night's in the sun, she thought, but at least Father O'Connell wasn't in the well, though did that make a difference? Could this dark be what the druids had meant by the fall of the sky? She wondered if she ought to switch off the light to help her mind go blank, and was nerving herself to do so when someone knocked at the front door.}

^{She shrank back against the headboard. Had Mann sensed her trying to recapture her awareness and come to deal with her before she could? 'Jump out the window and run like a hare,' she thought, 'there's nowhere to hide but Harry Moony hears where . . . ' She went downstairs as if her exhaustion was dragging her; there was no point in delaying the confrontation. But when she opened the door, she found the Booths.}

^{Jeremy looked harassed; Geraldine seemed oddly calm. 'May we come in?' Geraldine said.}

^{'Sure, of course,' Diana said wearily. 'I didn't mean to be rude.'}

^{They followed her into the front room, where Jeremy stared at the picture of the sticklike mountaineers as if it made him nervous. He cleared his throat. 'We didn't get very far.'}

^{'What stopped you?'}

^{'The van went off the road in the woods, and now we can't get it repaired. Nobody seems to want to go down there.'}

^{'Why not, do you think?'}

^{'Well, it's this wretched dark, isn't it? No wonder it makes folk nervous, preys on their minds. Mine too. At least we managed to find our way back. Luck was on our side for once.'}

^{'I'd say we were guided,' Geraldine said quietly.}

^{'Yes, well, let's not argue about that in front of Diana, all right? If that's how you felt, Gerry, then it's right for you.'}

^{'I don't want to cause an argument,' Diana said as casually as she could, 'but who did you feel you were guided by?'}

^{Geraldine looked defiant. 'There's only one person it could have been - our unborn son.'}

^{Whatever Diana was expecting, it wasn't this. Jeremy took her silence for embarrassment, and intervened hastily. 'Anyway, we just wanted to get the keys back from you and tell you we're back at the old place if you're feeling lonely.'}

^{Diana reached for her handbag and found the keys to the chapel. 'I wouldn't go out of the town if I were you,' Geraldine said, 'not while it's like this.'}

^{'Why not?' Diana demanded, more sharply than she would have wanted to.}

^{'I think we're safe where there are lights. We must be, otherwise we wouldn't have been brought back.'}

^{Safe from what? The more Geraldine said, the harder it might be for Diana to do what she was determined to try. She gave the keys to Jeremy, who stood up at once. 'Any time you want company, Diana, just come round. We unbelievers need to stick together.'}

^{Diana watched them climb the alley toward the High Street, their arms around each other. She remembered the broken window at the bookshop and told herself they would look after each other. She hadn't time to worry now, but she knew she would if she tried to relax. She had to try something else - go where she'd experienced her glimpses, up on the moor.}

^{As soon as the Booths were out of sight, she locked the cottage and took her flashlight from the car. She was tempted to stay well clear of the hotel, but she ventured as far as the corner of the square. Mann's window was still lit, with that pale light that made her think of bones, of death, of the skin of the eyeless lizard that had crawled out of the cave. She dodged into the nearest alley, even though there were no lamps in the narrow cobbled passage.}

^{Though the High Street was deserted where she crossed it, she hid the flashlight under her anorak and kept it there while she hurried to the moorland path. She climbed the path quickly, above the shrinking lamps, and switched on the flashlight as she reached the top. The oval of light spread across the charred moor, grew paler and vaguer until it petered out a couple of hundred yards away. She took a breath that tasted ashen, and climbed onto the moor.}

^{She'd hoped to feel her awareness stir, but there was only a blurred apprehension, as if the dark were creeping closer. The town was a few handfuls of light below her, a lit miniature that might as well be miles away. Around her was nothing but blackened stalks and bare black earth, not a hint of green. Trying not to breathe the ashen air too deeply, she set out for the cave.}

^{As soon as she left the edge above Moonwell, she wanted to look behind her. It was only her sense of the moor's cutting off the light of the town, she told herself. She switched off the flashlight to let her eyes adjust and to save the batteries. The dark rushed at her, filled her eyes, and then something else came, a glimpse of a face with eyes far too small for their sockets. She fumbled the flashlight on, so wildly that she almost dropped it in the blind dark.}

^{For a moment, or much longer, she didn't know where or who she was. The dark had turned into a cave, just too large for her light to reach the walls or the roof. It seemed like that because she'd felt as if she were in a cave when the shrunken face with tiny eyes far back in the sockets had reared up, out of a mass of decay that was still moving. She'd felt as if it wasn't happening to her, as if she was sharing someone else's experience; yet it had been appallingly vivid, the face that looked withered into the misshapen bone, clenched around its own intense evil, as it had pressed its lipless mouth onto hers. Was that what Mann had found in the cave?}

^{She bit her lip and said a silent prayer - she wasn't sure to whom - and closed her eyes as she switched off the flashlight. The dark crowded around her, chill and massive. It was all she could see now, even when she opened her eyes; at least, if she could make out the edges of slopes against the sky, they were so dim that she might as well have been imagining the sight. When she switched on the flashlight, she took her time about it, to prove that she could.}

^{The dark fell back - only the dark. She'd have to keep the light on; she would never find her way otherwise. Once she was above the cave, in the stone bowl, she could dispense with it, she told herself. She picked out the trampled path and started along it as quickly as she could, though the swaying oval of light made her feel as if shapes were dodging out of sight wherever it touched, closing in behind her as soon as the light had passed. She mustn't look back. Whichever way she turned, the dark would be behind her.}

^{She was on the slope up to the stone bowl when she halted, swallowing the taste of ash. She'd thought she heard a charred twig snap, a sound so minor it wouldn't have been audible except for the utter stillness. It might have been a breeze: how welcome that would be in this stillness! Or perhaps she'd snapped the twig herself, though she couldn't see any when she swung the flashlight beam around her feet. Perhaps she hadn't even heard the sound, she thought, and made herself follow the beam up the slope. By the time she reached the top, she'd managed to convince herself she was alone at the cave. But as the flashlight beam wavered up from probing the gaping stony mouth, it picked out a shape that stood on the far side of the bowl.}

^{FORTY ONE}

^{That was the day Nick realized more was wrong in Moonwell than he knew. Religious hysteria had overtaken the town, some kind of trance which, if he understood Diana correctly, made people unaware that the town was even on the map. That didn't quite make sense to him, but certainly nobody outside Moonwell seemed to want to know about Godwin Mann. His editor didn't and sent him to cover the latest outbreak of picketing in Lancashire. Julia was setting up a pirate station in a different suburb of Manchester, but she wanted nothing to do with Nick or any story he might offer her. All he could do was go to Moonwell to see for himself what was happening as soon as he had a day off.}

^{He'd told Diana he would, and he'd broken his promise. More disturbing, he hadn't realized until today that he'd let the chance to visit her drift by, when the early morning silence of the streets outside the newspaper building had reminded him of Moonwell -reminded him that he hadn't even thought of her for days. More was wrong than she had told him, and it seemed to be wrong with him as well.}

^{When he couldn't reach her by phone, he set off for Moonwell. In the midst of the Peak District he found he couldn't recall the route or locate Moonwell on the map. The sight of the forested slopes ahead reminded him of the route he'd once taken, and he'd driven into the forest, switching on his headlights as it grew cavernously dark under the trees. It was just the trees, he told himself; he would see daylight once he was out of the woods. And indeed he did: he saw racing clouds above the ridge that overlooked Moonwell. Then the clouds stopped, the daylight went out, as if the landscape were a slide that had been snatched from the viewer of his eyes.}

^{Before he could brake, the car ran off the road. The road must have curved - to the right, he seemed to remember. He swung the wheel that way, the only instinct that was left him in the dark that had taken the use of his eyes. Either his memory had tricked him or he'd passed the curve. The car tilted so violently he thought it was going to turn over as it continued down the unseen slope.}

^{All this felt like a dream, too abrupt to be real. The dark couldn't really be out there when he'd only just seen daylight. His foot was stamping on the brake, but it didn't seem to have much to do with him. He was going to find out at last what it was like to be in a car crash, he mused; he'd wondered ever since he'd had to visit accident victims as a cub reporter. You should let out your breath so as not to be winded by the impact, he thought, but he couldn't see when the impact was coming, could see nothing but the headlight beams jerking in space, as unable to grasp the dark as he was. His consciousness lurched then, and he realized he'd seen daylight, clouds, the ridge, only because he'd expected to. It was the dark that was real.}

^{He trampled harder on the brake, desperate to feel he had control of something. The car began to skid. The rear end slewed into what felt like space, like the edge of a sheer drop. Nick gulped and felt his bowels loosening. He released the brake, and the car slithered over the grass. A jagged rock broader than the windscreen seemed to leap into the headlight beams an instant before the car rammed the rock.}

^{The sight had made him suck in his breath. The air rushed out of him, bruising his throat and chest, as the seat belt snapped taut across him. Though the impact with the rock wasn't as vicious as he had feared, it put out the headlights.}

^{He reached blindly for the handbrake and pulled it as hard as he could, hardly knowing why; then he rubbed his chest with his shaking hands and tried to swallow while he stared vainly at the dark. He rolled down his window eventually, as if that might help his eyes. There was nothing but darkness and hectic after-images, no sense of distance, not even a glimpse of the car or the rock. He fumbled under the extinguished dashboard for the flashlight and found it at last on the mat beside the gear lever. It was smashed, useless.}

^{The one thought that held him back from panic was reminding himself that he hadn't gone blind. He'd seen the headlights until the crash had put paid to them. The dark was only dark, however unexpected at this time of day. Would he be better able to cope with it if he knew what was causing it? Sitting brooding about that wouldn't help at all. He groped for the door release and eased himself out of the car.}

^{He had to grip the upper edge of the door frame in order to lever himself to his feet. The slope was so steep that his heels slipped on the tilted floor of the vehicle. As he hauled himself upright, gripping the roof, he felt the car shift an inch. For a nightmarish moment he thought it was balanced on the edge of a sheer drop, thought that his movement had pushed it over. Then it stabilized, and he eased some of his weight off the roof, straightening himself gingerly until both feet were firmly planted on the grass.}

^{He waited until the dark stopped turning jerkily red in time with the thumping of his heart, then he closed his eyes and counted one hundred. When he opened them, he still couldn't distinguish his surroundings, not even the ridge that must be above him, against the sky. It didn't matter, he told himself. The road was up there, and once he reached it he could feel his way to Moon-well. All he needed to do was let go of the car and pick his way up the slope.}

^{It took him a long time to push himself off into the dark. He was tempted to wait until he saw lights on the road and then start running, but how long might he have to wait? Suppose whatever had made him and the rest of the world forget Moonwell had stopped the outgoing traffic? 'Get going, you damn fool,' he growled, to stop himself brooding over the cause of the darkness, and shoved himself upward, out of reach of the car.}

^{His voice sounded flattened and shrunken, and un-nervingly separate from him. He resisted the impulse to retreat to the car while he could still find it. The sooner he saw Diana, the happier he'd be. He should have done more to help her before it grew as late as it seemed to be now. He turned and, stretching out his unseen hands, took his first steps up the slope.}

^{A minute's oblique climbing brought him to a gentler incline where he could walk upright, moving one foot at a time, placing the heel of one against the toe of the other. He estimated that he'd climbed fifty yards or so in what he judged to be a straight line when a mass rose in front of him. He sensed it a moment before he touched it, fingertips prickling: heather. Above it the slope was too steep to be climbed blindly. Had it been as steep where the car had left the road, or was he losing his way? He groped his way along the bank of heather, bruising his fingers on chunks of rock, to the grass, where the slope was almost level. He halted there, listening.}

^{Shouldn't he be able to hear the occasional sound from the town? The stillness was total except for the noises of his own body; he'd never realized they were so various. The dark clung to his eyes like tar. He must be nearly at the road. He held back from walking faster, striding to it - the corky ground was by no means even, and he could sprain an ankle even if he didn't break his leg in a ditch. A hundred steps or less, he promised himself, and he'd be back on the road.}

^{Apart from a clump of heather that would have tripped him if he hadn't been walking carefully, there seemed to be nothing for the first hundred steps except the gentle slope. Of course he'd no reason to suppose a hundred steps would take him to the road, no reason to feel betrayed by himself or by anything else. Another fifty steps should do it, or if not, a few more. He obviously wouldn't be returning to the same point on the road. He wasn't sure how many steps he'd taken, having stopped counting because it made him feel tense, when he realized that the gentleness of the slope had lured him away from the road.}

^{He managed not to turn. He might forget which way he'd been facing, and be totally lost. You already are, a voice at the back of his mind complained, as he craned his head over one shoulder and then the other in the hope of somehow sensing the road, his bones creaking loudly. All he could sense was the dark that swarmed with his yearning to see. The road must be to his right, but how far? About ninety degrees, he figured, and set off at that angle. He'd taken three paces when he trod in a puddle under the grass.}

^{'Shit,' he muttered, sniggering at himself as he seesawed his arms to keep his balance while he pulled his foot out of the mud. Of course it was only his own laughter he was hearing. He inched forward, poking the ground with his toes before setting his feet down, until suddenly his foot groped into space. For a breathless moment he thought it had taken him over the edge. He threw himself backward and was sitting on wet grass. 'Bastard,' he snarled.}

^{At once he wished he hadn't spoken. It felt too much like acknowledging the laughter that could only be in his head, however real and vindictive it sounded - acknowledging it as though it were out there in the dark. He stretched out a hand before he could panic, to find out where he'd almost stepped over. It was a hollow, no wider than his arm could stretch. In finding that out he slipped forward on the grass, his hand sliding down the far side of the hollow, moist earth collecting under his fingernails, bulging them to the quick. His fingertips came to rest on a cold, slimy root at the bottom of the hollow, a root that felt like a misshapen hand. He was about to heave himself away from the hollow when the root moved.}

^{It squirmed and stretched along his hand and then, before he could recoil, it wasn't there. Nick scrambled backward out of the hollow. It must have been a lizard, he thought, trying to ignore how it had felt. It had felt as if the long cold hand he'd first taken it for had clasped his, momentarily, before withdrawing into the hollow.}

^{He stayed on all fours, glaring blindly about him. He felt like an animal at bay. He mustn't give in to that feeling; it was like giving in to the dark. He forced himself to reach for the hollow again, to be sure of avoiding it when he stood up. It was ridiculous to dread touching anything alive - the lizard must have been far more shocked than he was. He moved crabwise away from the hollow, and got quickly to his feet. Something was standing in front of him, waiting for him. He felt its cold breath on his face.}

^{'Just the wind,' he muttered, shivering, and wished again that he hadn't spoken; it made him feel surrounded by listeners. If it had been the wind, why hadn't he heard it in the grass? Why had he felt it only on his face? It had smelled like soil and decay, and made him think of a mouth that was yawning too widely. He would rather not put a face to such a mouth. 'Just wind,' he whispered, feeling as if he was trying not to be overheard.}

^{He tried again to visualize Diana: long legs, black hair streaming in the moorland wind. The memory felt like a promise of light, and helped muffle his dread of moving from where he was standing. He sidled a few feet - to sidestep the hollow, he told himself, not the thing which he'd imagined had breathed in his face - and then ventured forward. He'd taken two paces when something cold and smooth that smelled like a dank cave leaned over his shoulder and whispered in his ear.}

^{He never knew what it said. He swung round, lashing out blindly at whatever was there, his body blazing with fear and rage and a loathing of how his fist might feel when it landed. It plunged into air, and he went with it, fell to his knees again, bruising them and his hands on the rocky earth under the grass. He leaped up at once and realized he had no idea which way he'd been heading. 'Bastards,' he whispered, though really he wanted to scream the word to stop himself from weeping, whether with contempt for himself or horror at the nightmare he was living. He stood glaring so hard at the dark that not only his eyes but the skin around them stung, his fists trembling with readiness to lash out at anything that touched him, trembling like the onset of a convulsion that would shake him from head to foot. Every false image his eyes manufactured looked as if it were coming at him, grinning facelessly. He was sure he could sense presences creeping closer to him, surrounding him. He thought suddenly that they meant to drive him toward a sheer drop, make him take that last blind step. He swung round, fists raised, ready to defend his spot of ground where at least he was safe from falling, even if his mind wasn't safe from the dark and whatever might be reaching for him. Then he halted so abruptly that he wrenched his neck. He'd glimpsed a light somewhere.}

^{For a moment that felt like the edge of a drop; he suspected his eyes of playing tricks, in league with the dark. But no, there was a light, a distant glow to his left that outlined a ridge. He stumbled in that direction, would have run if he had been able to see the ground, however faintly. He trod in puddles, tripped over stones, and almost sprawled headlong several times, but it didn't matter: he was heading for light. It must be Moonwell - nothing else could make a light that wide up here. The promise of the distant glow made him feel as if the whisperers with their long hands and gaping mouths were close behind him, but he mustn't look round. He stumbled up the steepening slope toward the glow.}

^{When he reached the top, the light was beyond the next ridge. He limped downhill toward it, his ankles throbbing. Here and there he could just distinguish irregularities on the almost invisible slope - rocks, not crouching figures with pale, blank heads. He tried to remember where they were as he lost sight of them in the trough of dark. He was fighting for breath by the time he reached the upward slope.}

^{He almost groaned when he came over the ridge and saw that the glow was at least one more ridge distant. Perhaps it wasn't the town after all - it seemed too white for the glow of streetlamps - but it was light, that was all that mattered. He stumbled downward on his aching legs, into the drowning dark that was full of the threat of a whisper in his ear, and up the next slope. This one was so long that he was convinced it must lead to the glow or at least to a clear view of its source. He was almost at the top when the light went out, leaving him in the blind dark.}